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Director Peter Berg poses for a portrait while promoting the film "Lone Survivor" in New York, December 5, 2013. The film is based on the memoir by former U.S. Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell about the 2005 mission "Operation Red Wings" in Afghanistan. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson

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NEW YORK — No one in Hollywood wanted to make the film version of Lone Survivor more than actor-turned-director Peter Berg. He just had to wait five years and leverage his career by shooting Battleship first.

Berg adapted Lone Survivor from the autobiographical book by Marcus Luttrell and Patrick Robinson, Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10. It tells the horrifying story of how Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell survived Operation Red Wings, a failed mission by the American military in Afghanistan in June of 2005. Mark Wahlberg plays Luttrell.

“I read Marcus’ book about five years ago and it really got me,” the 51-year-old Berg says in an interview. “As a filmmaker, I was very attracted to it. There are many aspects of it that I like. But the real over-arching experience that I had reading it was that Marcus did such a great job of humanizing a war that we’re very detached from. We have real trouble connecting with what is happening there to our own lives.”

News reports about casualties “are just numbers,” Berg says, “and we just click on the next story and we move on and we have a lot of trouble really understanding and empathizing and really experiencing what it is that these men and women are going through and how brutal it can be.”

Berg, who jumped into the spotlight as an actor in the TV series Chicago Hope, played a soldier himself in a WWII drama, A Midnight Clear (1992). Berg’s filmmaking career includes directing the football drama Friday Night Lights and creating the TV series. Future projects include a sequel to Hancock (2008), his hit superhero comedy with Will Smith. Luttrell chose Berg, among other options, after meeting him and seeing how he layered in realistic details in The Kingdom (2007), a fictional account of a terrorist crisis in Saudi Arabia that starred Jamie Foxx and Jennifer Garner.

Berg clearly puts Lone Survivor in a separate category. He says he gravitated to the project “as a patriot and someone who does support soldiers and anyone who is willing to put themselves in between us and danger, whether it is a firefighter or a cop or an emergency room doctor. Anyone who is willing to go in there and risk their life is worthy of respect. That was one reason that I was very attracted to this story and why I wanted to make this film — to give people the opportunity to see what’s really happening, to let people see what it really looks like and really sounds like for someone to die (in a modern war). And I think it’s important to acknowledge that.”

But Berg did have to leverage and even compromise his career by doing Battleship first (it was a box office flop). “That is accurate,” Berg says. “I was moving down the road with Lone Survivor and the studio asked me if I would do Battleship first and then do Lone Survivor, and I said yes. I didn’t think it was necessarily a bad thing to let Lone Survivor take some time. I don’t know that, five years ago, the public would be as receptive as, hopefully, they are now.”

Lone Survivor opened in late December in New York and Los Angeles, doing extremely well in its limited release. The film opens widely on Friday.